HBO Backing Game of Thrones Show for Another Two Years as it Speeds Through the Books

Brutal and sexy TV pantomime Game of Thrones will continue for at least another couple of years, thanks to network backer HBO ordering another two seasons of the show. So catch up on who's killing and sleeping with who and who's dead now, because it's not going anywhere.

Meanwhile, the expensive epic is accused of glossing over the detail found in its source material -- George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series -- by spending just 0.8 minutes of screen time per page of the book. Up to the end of series three, Game of Thrones has chucked out over 26 hours of TV, covering around 1,980 pages of the books.

Compared with slower paced book-to-TV material like Boardwalk Empire, GoT is whizzing through the events of the books, with Boardwalk taking a staggering 8.7 minutes to retell an average page of the book.

And as you might expect, the extremely lengthy modern retelling of The Hobbit tops the film page length charts, taking 1.37 minutes of screen time to get through each page of plot -- twice as slow as the pace at which The Great Gatsby rattled though its source story. [The Verge, Guardian]